Richard Kerschagl, Volkswirtschaftslehre (1927)

Kerschagl’s Volkswirtschaftslehre is framed not as a doctrine to be memorized but as a disciplined passage through doctrines. The preface names the contemporary state of economics as a “volle Gärung,” and the book’s main thesis follows: no theory can be judged outside the economic-historical situation that called it forth, yet every logically coherent theory preserves some determinate insight. Hence the didactic principle:

Nur wer die Dogmen der Volkswirtschaftslehre kennt, kennt überhaupt „Volkswirtschaftslehre“.

English translation: Only he who knows the doctrines of economics knows "economics" at all.

To know economics is to know how its terms, methods, and basic functions have shifted. Kerschagl refuses both closed system-building and dissolving relativism; the past is not antiquarian material but the condition of intelligibility:

daß das Seiende nur aus dem Gewesenen richtig verstanden werden kann.

English translation: that what is can be rightly understood only from what has been.

His structure enacts that thesis. Part I presents mercantilism and physiocracy as responses to early modern expansion. Mercantilism arises with trade, colonial metals, and the fiscal-military state; its core error and strength alike lie in treating the national economy as a merchant’s balance sheet:

Der Staat wird dem Privaten gleichgestellt und seine Wirtschaft mit der eines Kaufmannes verglichen.

English translation: The state is placed on the same footing as the private individual, and its economy is compared to that of a merchant.

Physiocracy corrects this with an “organic” view of circulation, proportionality, agriculture, and natural order; it supplies the first genuinely national-economic concepts, but also the liberal faith that positive order should approximate natural order. Part II then reads classical economics as the first compact system: Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and Carey make egoism, labor, productive factors, price, and distributional “movement laws” central. Kerschagl’s key move is to show that classical liberalism unintentionally arms socialism: labor-value theory, subsistence wages, and Ricardo’s distributional opposition pass directly into Marx.

The section on German economics is the counter-movement to English atomism. Thünen mathematizes isolation; List shifts attention from goods to “productive Kräfte”; the Romantics and historical school bind economy to state, society, ethics, and historical development. Their shared contribution is not a single doctrine but a reversal of perspective:

Nicht die Waren- und Gütermengen bestimmen den Wohlstand, sondern die Leistungsfähigkeit, nicht die manuelle Arbeit allein ist Wert schaffend, sondern auch — und oft viel mehr — die geistige.

English translation: It is not quantities of wares and goods that determine prosperity, but productive capacity; not manual labor alone creates value, but also — and often to a far greater degree — intellectual labor.

The large chapter on socialism then treats utopian association, Marxism, revisionism, socialization debates, communism, and anarchism without reducing them to slogans. Kerschagl defines socialism economically through two linked concepts:

Man gelangt somit zu zwei Begriffen, welche wirklich für die sozialistischen Theorien aller Zeiten, so sehr sie sich voneinander unterscheiden mögen, charakteristisch sind: Zum Begriff der wirtschaftlichen Gleichheit und der planmäßigen Wirtschaftsordnung, welche einander ergänzen und gegenseitig bedingen.

English translation: One thus arrives at two concepts which are truly characteristic of socialist theories of all periods, however much they may differ among themselves: the concept of economic equality and that of a planned economic order, which complement and mutually condition one another.

Part V turns to the psychological value theories and the Austrian school as a decisive re-founding of economic science. Gossen, Menger, Wieser, and Böhm-Bawerk relocate value from objective cost to subjective need, scarcity, marginal utility, imputation, and time. Kerschagl summarizes the conceptual break sharply:

Die neue Wertlehre ist durchwegs subjektiv, weil sie den Wert als Schätzung des Subjektes und nicht als Eigenschaft eines Gegenstandes betrachtet

English translation: The new theory of value is thoroughly subjective, because it regards value as the estimation of the subject and not as a property of an object.

The money chapter extends the same historical method from quantity theory through Currency versus Banking, bimetallism, metallism and chartalism, Knapp, inflation, stabilization, and Keynesian price-level policy. The center of gravity shifts from metal to purchasing power:

Der Wert des Geldes ist sein innerer Wert, seine Kaufkraft.

English translation: The value of money is its inner value, its purchasing power.

The final chapter surveys Spann, Cassel, Liefmann, Pesch, and Keynes as signs of a widened discipline moving “vom Ding zum Menschen, von der Wirtschaft zur Gesellschaft.” Kerschagl’s own position appears most plainly where he denies the autonomy of economics as an ultimate end:

Wirtschaft ist nicht das Höchste, ist nicht Selbstzweck. Sie beinhaltet nur reale Mittel für ideale Zwecke.

English translation: The economy is not the highest thing, it is not an end in itself. It contains only real means for ideal ends.

This is the book’s relevance: it maps economics as a contested interwar science between mechanism and society, value and price, freedom and planning, metal and credit. Its final Keynesian passage names the practical horizon toward which Kerschagl’s historical exposition has been moving:

Unser Problem geht dahin, eine Gesellschaftsorganisation zu schaffen, die möglichst leistungsfähig ist, ohne dabei unsere Ideen über eine befriedigende Lebensführung zu verletzen.

English translation: Our problem is to create a social organization that is as productive as possible, without thereby violating our ideas of a satisfactory way of life.